Published on Thursday, January 18, 2018 By Island Dog In Offworld News

Stock Markets and Rival Businesses Aren't Your Enemies HereIn "Limited Supply," your main goal is simple: survive. This was the only objective for the first pioneers from Earth before business on Mars started booming. Play through over a dozen challenging scenarios and overcome the struggles of settling on Mars by aiding the growing colonies and ensuring their healthy futures.

------ DLC Features ------

New ScenariosExperience over a dozen new missions, each with their own challenges! Each new scenario has unique rule sets and locations that will take you on a fun and exciting journey as humanity settles on Mars.

Changing EnvironmentAs you progress through the scenarios, you will face different restrictions on what you're able to buy and sell. In order to survive, you'll have to constantly re-evaluate your strategies and adapt to each new location and challenge.

Evolving TechnologiesIn a normal game of Offworld, you'd build up your business so that you could buy out your competition. Instead, you'll need to meet a list of objectives set by the colony. As you progress, the tech you have access to becomes more advanced - but, so do the colony's requests!

Unique ChallengesThis DLC breaks the core rule of Offworld Trading Company, which is "buy what you want, when you want (as long as you've got the cash)." Each scenario has a different ruleset that restricts what resources you're allowed to buy and sell - even essentials like food, water, fuel and oxygen! Failing to maintain a steady supply and manage your resources effectively could mean catastrophe for the colony - and for you.

A New Way to PlayInstead of the head-to-head "buy or be bought out" combat in a normal game of Offworld, this DLC lets you experience the game through a series of puzzles needing to be solved. There is no stock market, no competing businesses - your only competition here is Mars itself.

Take advantage of the Stardock Community Discount and get 10% off when you buy direct from us!Available for purchase on Steam

Published on Thursday, January 18, 2018 By Zultar327 In Offworld Dev Journals

Offworld Trading Company has gotten a major patch and a brand new DLC this week, so we’re going to take some time today to break down what we’ve been up to for the past couple of months.

Limited Supply

Limited Supply is our new DLC, and it breaks Offworld’s rules in a way we haven’t done before. Featuring 17 new singleplayer scenarios, LS will allow players to explore what Mars was like in the early days of colonization. Gone are the free markets that rule Mars now, strict contracts and sheer scarcity will determine what (if anything) the player is allowed to buy and sell. Also gone are the modern stock markets. Rather than competing for a monopoly of any given Martian Market, players will initially be simply fighting to survive. Once they’ve proven that they can handle a business on Mars local colonies will begin asking players for help and support as they also try to find their feet. Each location has a different market and unique requirements. Because of this, the 17 scenarios play out like puzzles, with players being asked to find a path to victory despite some difficult restrictions being placed on them.

Published on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 By Frogboy In GalCiv III Dev Journals

Happy new year!

This month marks my one-year anniversary of returning to my beloved Galactic Civilizations as its lead designer. And since then, we've made a lot of changes much to the joy and angst of many galactic conquerors.

Unintended Consequences

With the announcement of the third expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations III imminent, this serves as a good time to look at where we stand today.

For the past year, I've been going through and weeding out improvements, events and other game modifiers that had unintended consequences.

The very first thing I did was read all the forum posts on GalCiv3.com, Steam, Reddit, elsewhere and see a lot of criticism for what amounts to unintended consequences of multiplying bonuses. Getting rid of these has been good for the game but not all players appreciate the changes since it dramatically nerfs their gameplay.

For example, with the right combination, you could get ships with a base speed of over 40 moves per turn. That's without adding an engine. There are players who have posted complaints at how slow things get when they try to move their 90 move per turn ship around late game on a ludicrous sized galaxy.

The game itself was designed (and thus the underlying engine) on the premise that you wouldn't get many ships with more than say 10 moves per turn.

While the AI could be scripted to do the same thing, it would destroy the game. If you think it's slow for you to move a ship 90 moves per turn, imagine 60 AI players doing it with 400 ships per turn. Even with a multicore Astar path finding algorithm, it would make the game both unplayable and not fun (what's the point of even having defenses or a forward line if ships can swoop in from sectors away every turn?).

So there's been a lot of work to get things balanced together. It's not a matter of trying to change the game around as much as making the game play as had been originally intended. As a math nerd, when I came in and saw the numbers it was just a matter of time to find all these unintended bonuses and kill them off.

Version 2.8: Invasions & Accessibility

One of our Fall tasks was to do more focus testing on why people don't find GalCiv III that approachable. From watching new players, one thing was incredibly obvious. The DESIGNER button at the top of the screen of the main screen was killing us.

Think about it. You're new to the game and you are just clicking on buttons and you click on the Designer button and you get a super complex screen. It's poison to new players.

The thing is, we don't really need that button. For one thing, players can design ships from the main menu now. Secondly, the ship designer, while super cool, isn't one of the features you need to use to manage your empire. It belongs as part of the shipyard.

The second big task we worked on for 2.8 was the AI managing legions. The concept of having to train legions and then put them on transports was relatively new as of 2.5. And while the GalCiv III AI is somewhat genetic in how it works, I still have to make the "tests" that it has to pass to determine whether it's on the right track.

Unfortunately, I was quickly schooled by other GalCiv players in not being very good at keeping a healthy supply of legions and transports ready to deal with opportunities. And my own weaker assumptions got passed on to the AI. Version 2.8 addresses this. Hard.

The rest of the AI changes were small but add up to a big difference. For instance, previously, the AI had a one-size fits all fleet size. While good enough for most players, our better players found themselves able to actually out compete the AI even on harder levels. Thus, the AI gained the ability to evaluate different sized fleets based on a number of galactic conditions (instead of a fixed size).

Cleaning

Most of my work was on Crusade. We brought over features from Crusade to the base game but we didn't bring what is arguably the more important aspect of it - cleaning and streamlining.

Put your new player hat on and load up the base game. You have tons of technologies to choose from with lots of improvements, weapons and modules that really just are hard to grasp onto. Thus, we streamlined the base game for 2.8 so that there are fewer techs available at the start and what they provide is more obvious and more beneficial.

Population Growth

Population growth is tricky. On the one hand, you want it to be realistic but on the other, you don't really want it to be realistic because realism can be pretty boring.

So we have population growth default to 0.1 population growth per turn. Many good players recognized that if you loaded up transports with tiny populations to colonize you could get huge benefits by fast expanding. And a big part of our work has been to support tall empires and not give fast expansion too big of a benefit.

For 2.8, we made the minimum population you can have on a colony ship be 1. This makes colonizing a planet somewhat more serious than previous and allows us to avoid having to do a % population growth (do the math, there's no happy ending with a flat % growth -- boring or broken).

Diplomacy

We are in the process of adding some new diplomatic modifiers. One of which is "We have a long, happy friendship" which essentially helps reward players who have been keeping the peace a long time from suddenly having players going to conquer them. We already have various hidden mitigating factors for this but we haven't had anything a player could visibly see.

As always...

Anything you can do to spread the word on Galactic Civilizations helps. Sales determine how many engineers we can put on the game.

When GalCiv III first came out, it was at a supreme disadvantage because it was on a brand-new engine. But now, as we enter 2018, it's multi-core, 64 bit engine is looking pretty awesome as the rapid progress should, I hope, make apparent. You'll be happy to know that the Spectre and Meltdown fixes you may have heard of will affect GalCiv III very little because we don't rely on single CPU core performance.

Those of you who have moved to 4K probably have noticed just how future-proof GalCiv III is. As time goes on, the game gets richer, deeper and more polished and with your help, we can ensure it is the ultimate 4X space strategy game.

Published on Wednesday, December 20, 2017 By Draginol In GalCiv III Dev Journals

Just in time for Christmas we released version 2.71 which is almost strictly about AI tweaks based on player feedback and saved games. Now, someone might ask "Why do you need save games to make the AI do [obvious thing]?". The answer is that with so many different ways of playing the game (both in terms of game setup and in-game strategies) it turns out people play the game very differently from one another. It's one of the reasons why you have most people who think the AI is really good and some people who think the AI is a total push-over. It's not that the latter group are cheating or even exploiting, they have simply discovered a strategy that is unbeatable.

But as much as version 2.71 improves the AI, I'd like to give you a sneak preview of 2.8...

Published on Friday, December 15, 2017 By GGTheMachine In Ashes Dev Journals

Hey guys! This week we launched the opt-in for the 2.65 update which when released, will wrap us up for the year.

Today I'm teasing some more info about the upcoming DLC and I'd like to send out best wishes to everyone for the holiday season! **Upcoming DLC**

Part of the upcoming DLC will include a number of Scenarios and Skirmish/Multiplayer maps which I've been working on for the last two months. Many of the maps are in response to types that we currently lack such as symmetrical team-oriented 5v5/6v6/7v7. Here's Caldera, a Large 6v6 map!

Published on Thursday, December 14, 2017 By Island Dog In GalCiv III News

Newest Updates Bring Players What They Asked For:New Fan Requested Features, Reduced Wait Times, Improved Game Balance and MoreFor a detailed list of updates, view the changelog at the bottom of this post.

v2.7 Highlights:

Faster Load TimesData management used to be handled by an external, single-threaded process. This caused some headaches with certain anti-virus programs that would flag the behavior. Our adjustments merges the new data manager with the game and multi-core, making your wait time fly by when loading up a new game.

AI ImprovementsThis update also includes our first pass at procedural planet building for the AI. Essentially, the AI looks at the state of the galaxy, its empire, and its planets, then uses this data to prioritize what should be built on its planets.

Fan RequestsThe majority of the update has been dedicated to fixing issues that come back to bite players way late in the game. If you enjoy multiplayer, you'll be especially happy about some of the adjustments! Also, we've worked in some commonly requested features like being able to toggle between turn number and date, making planetary improvements more destructible, additional balance updates, and more.

The v2.7 update is ready and waiting for you in your Steam client! If you haven't already joined the Crusade, the expansion is available at Stardock, GOG, orSteam.

Important!We've removed the need for bat files in the game to compile data. Data is now compiled by the EXE. The big upside is that updates won't be flagged by AV software as suspicious. A bonus side-effect is that it also improves the startup time. Modders: The game now scans both your base game and Crusade folder on startup. Previously, it would scan just the Crusade folder.

Gameplay

AI increases the odds of building farm improvements if it is running low on food

AI more aggressive in terraforming tiles.

AI more aggressive in building up planets before switching to durational

General AI improvements to what citizen type it will choose based on galactic conditions

Minor balance pass on Crusade tech tree costs based on recent changes on benefit from improvements.

Made many of the planetary improvements destructible again based on player feedback

Published on Tuesday, December 12, 2017 By Island Dog In Ashes of the Singularity News

This Update Improves Maps, Adjusts Campaigns, and Provides Highly Requested Multiplayer FixUpdate also adds new splash screens for campaigns, scenarios, and benchmarkFor a detailed list of updates, view the changelog at the bottom of this post.

v2.65 Highlights:

Quality of Life ChangesFans of multiplayer are going to love this one! Regions owned by players who disconnect during a multiplayer match can now be claimed by others. Additionally, damage status updates for Dreadnoughts, Juggernauts, and the Nexus will always play immediately so that you can respond to an attack right away.

Campaign ImprovementsChanges in recent updates have caused us to re-evaluate some of our campaigns and how they flow. To ensure a more balanced and intuitive campaign experience, we've made several adjustments, including adding some advanced defenses to certain missions, updating grammar to fit with the voiced dialogue, granting access to certain units, pacing changes, and more.

Map UpdatesThe call for more strategic diversity in our maps was loud and clear! We have made adjustments on certain playing fields that fix the proportion of Radioactives, which was previously too low. We also fixed some of those pesky spawn points and areas that were unbuildable on some maps.

We have updated the thumbnails for most of the Scenarios so that each one now has their own unique image, instead of having a few shared among them.

New Benchmark Screen

We have improved the layout and appearance of the pre-benchmark screen.

Quality of Life

Regions can now be claimed from players who have disconnected from a multiplayer match

Damage status updates for Dreadnoughts, Juggernauts and the Nexus will always play immediately

Balance

In 2.5, we reduced the health of the Assembly to make it weaker than the PHC Counterparts to compensate for its versatility. Since it can no longer produce air units, we are restoring some of that health.

Increased Health of Assembly from 1200 to 1600

Orbital Nullifiers (Structures) will no longer block capturing of regions

Campaign Changes

Avatar and Sapper advanced defences now available in most missions

Juggernauts and Nexus Health upgrade now available on King of the Hill scenario

Imminent Crisis

Fixed some inconsistent grammar between the audio and text in Deneb

Medic is now available in Deneb

Falcon is now available from the beginning of Calethaon

Removed Dialog about Smarties in Calethaon as it felt abrupt and out of context. (Due to lacking another now obsolete line to preface it)

Delayed the arrival of the Overmind on Artorius when playing on lower difficulties, to varying degrees

Barrager is now available on Roceda & Silgul

Increased starting Quanta on Decanus to compensate for increased cost of Incursion

Escalation

The changes to Substrate air production in 2.6 created some issues in the Escalation campaign which we are now addressing. We are also removing some outdated dialog that now provides incorrect information.

Aviary is now buildable in Betelgeuse and Rosette with Pan, Dominator and Punisher unlocked

Removed obsolete dialog about Harvesters in Betelguese

Removed obsolete dialog about Saboteur in Rosette

Removed obsolete dialog from Lagoan revealing the Brute Mk2 and Hera

Removed confusing and misleading mention of Harvesters from Leo

Map Changes

We're fixing some map issues and changing a few maps that had too low a proportion of Radioactives, which limited strategic diversity.

Fixed unbuildable Radioactives Deposit on Lyra

Fixed unbuildable Metal Deposit on Aenghus

Added additional Radioactives Deposits on Shredded

Added additional Radioactives Deposits on Manannan

Added additional Radioactives Deposits on Anishanaa

Balanced all 6 spawns on Anishanaa

Fixed a disconnect between two regions in "Crack the Shell"

Adjusted Turinium requirements on several team game maps to reduce outliers that were set too high or too low

Bug Fixes

Fixed several tooltip errors

Fixed a bug where "Turtle Wars" Scenario had invulnerable turrets.

Fixed a bug where Medics were still running towards buildings, despite no longer being able to repair them

Fixed a bug where multiple Engineers were losing their build speed bonuses after the first structure

Fixed a bug where hotkeys weren't showing up on Quantum Upgrade icons

Fixed a bug where pending Logistics warnings were not showing up for peers in a multiplayer game.

Fixed a bug where the Pan didn't have an icon on the Empire Tree

Fixed an issue where holding down the mouse click when using attack move would instead box select

Fixed a bug where Juggernauts would do low damage after obtaining huge amounts of levels and upgrades